Rogues’ Gallery

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cut quite a swath during his recent visit to the U.S. We wrote here about his appearance at Yale, but until tonight I hadn’t read about Mahmoud’s get-together with a motley crew of anti-Americans at the Warwick Hotel in New York. This report is from the Pan-African News Wire, an entity with which I am not familiar, but I take it at face value:

Over 100 activists and journalists from various organizations, religious groups and media outlets attended a gathering with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Warwick Hotel in New York City on September 21. The leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran was in the city to attend the annual United Nations General Assembly.
Some of the individuals and organizations in attendance included former U.S. Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate for 2008 Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, poet and activist Amiri Baraka, MOVE Minister of Information Ramona Africa, International Action Center Co-Director Sara Flounders, Ardeshir and Eleanor Ommani, co-founders of the American-Iranian Friendship Committee, Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Million Worker March Movement organizer Brenda Stokely, Shafeah M’balia of the Black Workers for Justice, Phil Wilayto of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality, Larry Holmes of the Bailout the People Movement, Don DeBar of Wbaix.org, Ryme Katkhouda of the People’s Media Center among others.

What a rogues’ gallery! The biggest surprise on that list is that Ramsey Clark is still alive. The Pan-African News Wire explains what binds this group together:

During the course of the evening guests enjoyed an Iranian-style dinner and were later ushered into a conference room where representatives from various organizations spoke on the plight of people inside the United States during the current period. Issues involving the displacement of African-Americans in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina, the burgeoning prison-industrial-complex, the conditions facing political prisoners, the crisis in U.S.-Iranian relations and the overall economic crisis dominated the discussion.
After an hour-and-a-half of speeches from 22 individuals, President Ahmadinejad then addressed the guests for approximately forty-five minutes. His remarks touched on the international struggle for peace and justice saying that “trying to build peace is the most important and comprehensive struggle that mankind can have.”
The president also stated that “Those who are opposed to justice are a few, a minority. He reiterated his main point during an earlier address before the General Assembly saying that “It seems to me that one of the main factors in discrimination, and war, and injustice, is the capitalist system. The foundation of the capitalist system is based on superiority, hegemony, and the violation of the rights of others. You can see they start wars to fill up their pockets.”

We and many others have written repeatedly about the seemingly odd alliance between radical Muslims and left-over leftists. Ahmadinejad’s Iran hardly seems like a Marxist paradise–its economy is a wreck, subsisting parasitically on oil production while the theocratic regime stones its own people for imagined crimes and enforces medieval dress codes. Is this what the downfall of capitalism was always about?
Perhaps so. One thing we’ve learned for sure is that leftists will align themselves with anyone who attacks capitalism–which is to say, freedom–and mouths the stupid platitudes of the Left. The alliance is, perhaps, not surprising; it represents the age-old collaboration of evil against good.